2014.03.23 10:55

The alternatives command on Fedora-descended systems (RHEL, Scientific Linux, CentOS, etc.) permits two versions of the same utility to exist on a system at the same time by automatically switching links from a canonical path to the actual versioned path when necessary. Quite a few other system utilities have come to rely on it, namely the post-install section on quite a few RPMs call alternatives to set up parallel versions of things like language runtimes.

So many other tools use alternatives that use of alternatives itself seems to have become a lost art. It may be that the popularity of this distro family has simply diluted the knowledge pool as the user ranks have swelled with newcomers who simply take the automation for granted. As with many convenience utilities, widespread success in one user generation can hamstring adoption and understand in the next.

It should be noted that alternatives is a system-wide command, so when root sets an alternative it affects everyone’s view of the system. This problem of binary or path-view alternatives has other, but very similar, solutions on other systems like Gentoo and Debian. Gentoo’s eselect system is a bit more sophisticated and can manage families of alternatives at once (links to a number of disparate language utilities which have to change in arbitrary ways based on which underlying runtime is selected, for example).

2014.03.3 12:24

From time to time I encounter openly discoverable code that is so wild in nature that I can’t help but wonder if the author was writing a machine function or a satirical statement.

Groovy source: ArrayUtil.java

After spending a few days plowing through Java code at the outset of a new Android project I found myself checking around for practical alternatives. In the course of that search (which netted Scala, Groovy and Clojure, in descending order of easy tooling for Android) I stumbled across this gem of a source file in the Groovy codebase. At first I couldn’t really tell if this was a joke about Java’s expressiveness or a functioning bit of code, but then I realized it is actually both — all the more funny because its expressing a cumbersome optimization that will execute on the same JVM either way:

Breach: A browser as practical satire

Someone from the Erlang world was kind enough to paste a link to Breach — a browser written in node.js. Its so full of meta fail and manifests the very essence of hipster circular logic that… I can only assume it is satire in the same vein as INTERCAL.

IBM SDK for Node.js on System Z

The going question at IBM has, for the last few decades at least, not been “Is it a good idea?” but “Are people deluded enough to pay for this?” This stands in heavy contrast to the countless bouts of genius that have peppered their research and development over the last century.

But IBM is a business, after all, and we’ve all got to eat. IBM was late recognizing that the majority of programmers and other IT professionals had left the world of engineering behind for the greener pastures of pop culture and fansterish tech propaganda, and to play catch up IBM had to innovate. Actually, this is a sort of business genius: IBM realized that tech doesn’t sell as well as bullshit and buzz when it watched Motorola get steamrolled by Intel’s marketing efforts around the original 286.

IBM has gone one further. I think this must have started as a practical joke at IBM, and then someone realized “Wait! Holy shit! This could be the hipster coup of the century and get us back in the web game!” Har har har. Joke’s on… all of us.

“Process scope variables” in Erlang

I couldn’t have written a more concise satire-by-demonstration on what sucks about bringing the Java-style OOP thinking process as mental/emotional baggage when one starts using Erlang than this short message that appeared on the Erlang-Questions mailing list one day:

> So much time spent for removing one State variable from a few function calls.
much more time will be saved when refactoring from now on.
imagine:
most funs will now have signature:
-spec a(pid()) -> ok.
and most function bodies will look like:
check(Pid),
update(Pid),
return(Pid).
it will be a breeze now.